Gamers eager to leave their own mark on Skyrim will be able to do so starting early next week.

Maybe now Skyrim will get some Labradoodles.

Bethesda vice president of PR and marketing Pete Hines today announced via his Twitter account that PC Creation Kit mod tools for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be released Tuesday. He also teased that the publisher would have a "special surprise" to go with it, though gave no indication what it could be.

Designed to support the modding community, the Creation Kit gives gamers access to Bethesda's own development tools to make new Skyrim content. Likewise, Valve's Steam Workshop tool for Skyrim will aid PC gamers in finding and installing community-created game mods.

While the PC Creation Kit will no doubt spur the mod community for Skyrim, the game's do-it-yourself fanbase isn't waiting for Bethesda's help in tinkering with the game. Check out the video below for a look at some of the game's earliest fan-made modifications and where to get them.

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Next month at the 2012 Game Developers Choice Awards, Deus Ex and Epic Mickey designer Warren Spector will leave with a piece of hardware only 11 others have ever received. GDCA event organizers today announced that Spector will be the recipient of the group's Lifetime Achievement award.

Warren Spector joins an esteemed club of designers to win a Lifetime Achievement award.

The award, which was given to Lionhead Studios leader Peter Molyneux last year, "recognizes the career and achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development and games as a whole," according to event organizers.

Previous winners include Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Metal Gear Solid designer Hideo Kojima, and Civilization studio head Sid Meier.

Presently the founder of Austin, Texas-based Junction Point Studios, Spector has been in the game business for 30 years. Arguably his most famous work was 2000's original Deus Ex, which he served as producer on at Ion Studios.

Spector left Ion Studios in 2004 and formed Junction Point Studios. Disney Interactive Studios acquired the company in 2007, and the shop put out Epic Mickey in 2010 to mixed reviews.

Spector will accept his award in person at the 12th annual GDCA ceremony on Wednesday, March 7, as part of the 2012 Game Developers Conference. GameSpot will stream video of the event live.

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The creators behind a host of Atari arcade classics are reuniting to take on mobile and social games. Their new studio, Innovative Leisure, was unveiled today through a Time Magazine feature and a THQ announcement that the publisher would be handling multiple games from the developer, starting later this year.

Blackley didn't work for Atari but has a lengthy history in games nonetheless.

Innovative Leisure is the brainchild of Seamus Blackley, technical director of the original Xbox. As president of the new outfit, Blackley tapped a handful of old-school arcade developers--most of them from Atari--for a new venture to leverage their experience with pick-up-and-play projects in social and mobile gaming markets that share the same priorities. The lineup of developers includes Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede, Gauntlet), Rich Adam (Missile Command, Gravitar), Ed Rotberg (Battlezone, S.T.U.N. Runner), Tim Skelly (Rip Off, Reactor), and Owen Rubin (Major Havoc, Space Duel), among others.

There are a number of parallels between the arcade market and the current social and mobile sector of today, including a low barrier to entry for casual audiences, both in terms of the investment required and the complexity of the games themselves. "We've come full circle," Rubin told Time. "The iPad and the iPhone--they're the new arcade."

According to the magazine, Innovative Leisure has a total of 30 employees working to release seven games this year. One of the games, WWI Dogfight, is a turn-based flight combat game that features asynchronous multiplayer action with players piloting biplanes back and forth.

Innovative Leisure will have a formal unveiling at next week's DICE Summit in Las Vegas with a featured keynote panel titled "The New Arcade." The DICE Summit (It stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is an annual conference where movers and shakers in the game industry converge to talk about the latest trends and discuss the next big thing with their peers. GameSpot will be at the event, with complete video coverage of all the sessions, as well as the Interactive Achievement Awards, which will be held Thursday, February 9 and hosted by Jay Mohr.

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EA Partners will release Respawn Entertainment's first game, as well as two other previously unannounced titles, by March 2013, according to a purportedly leaked internal marketing calendar.

French gaming site Hardgamers reported it discovered an EA Partners marketing calendar for the April 2012-March 2013 period that included mention of Respawn, The Secret World, Overstrike, Outernauts, and Populous. The release calendar indicated all titles were to be released by March 2013.

Electronic Arts might bring Respawn's game to light by March 2013.

As for the titles on the sheet, The Secret World's inclusion falls in line with the game's already announced April release date. That title is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game presently in development at Funcom and set for release on the PC.

The rest of the games on the list, on the other hand, previously either did not have a release window attached to them or were not known to exist at all.

Most notable is the debut title from Respawn Entertainment, the studio formed by a flurry of former Call of Duty developers. Outside of a blurry screenshot, details are nearly nonexistent concerning Respawn's first game. However, it is rumored to be a science-fiction first-person shooter that might support 3D.

Also included on the marketing calendar, according to the website, was Overstrike, Insomniac Games' squad-based stylized multiplatform shooter, which was announced at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo without a release window.

Additionally, the website is reporting that the calendar included mention of a game called Outernauts, a title that EA has not formally announced and one that has ties to Insomniac. On January 28, the Santa Monica, California-based game developer filed a trademark with the United States Patent & Trademark Office covering use of the term "Outernauts" in video games.

As for the mention of Populous on the release calendar, the real-time strategy series has laid dormant since 2007's Populous DS. No additional information concerning the title was made available.

As of press time, EA had not responded to GameSpot's request for comment on the matter.

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Mark Zuckerberg and his $28 billion-in-waiting aside, one of the biggest winners thus far from Facebook's initial public offering announcement is Zynga. Shares in the company have spiked 33 percent since rumblings of Facebook's imminent IPO filing emerged on Monday. The CityVille creator is currently trading up nearly 10 percent to $13.60 per share as of press time.

CityVille is the No. 1 game on the No. 1 social network.

Prior to this week, Zynga's stock valuation has floundered since its own heavily hyped IPO in December. The stock came out behind on its first day of public trading, after the company set an opening valuation of $10. Since then, the stock hadn't shown much signs of life, bottoming out at $7.97 per share in mid-January.

However, as revealed in Facebook's Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Zynga is a significant contributor to the social network's top line. Of the $3.71 billion in revenues Facebook earned in 2011, 12 percent, or about $450 million, came from Zynga's sale of virtual goods.

Zynga products account for seven of the top 10 games on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Currently, Zynga's CityVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, and CastleVille are the top social games on Facebook.

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It's not that Sega Sammy is doing especially poorly, per se. It's more that the Japanese company continues to struggle in the Western market.

Sonic did his part, but Sega didn't have much else.

Today, Sega Sammy issued its April-December 2011 earnings, reporting revenues of ¥312 billion ($4.07 billion), down .5 percent from the same period in 2010. Profit also gave up some of its massive gains from the year-ago period, falling 6 percent to ¥34.384 billion ($449 million).

Sega Sammy's slot-machine business in Japan continues to be the company's moneymaker, as the segment posts an operating profit of ¥67.495 billion ($881 million) on revenues of ¥177.716 billion ($2.32 billion). The consumer business, of which console, handheld, mobile, and social games are party, is Sega Sammy's second-largest segment and did not fare so well.

Net sales for its home-gaming segment fell 4.9 percent year-over-year to ¥64.101 billion ($837 million). The segment also reversed last year's modest operating profit, posting a ¥5.51 billion ($71.9 million) operating loss during the period.

Though Sega Sammy proffered no console unit-sales figures, the company said top releases during the period were Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games and Sonic Generations. The company also said that it found significant success with its mobile title Kingdom Quest, which sold 2 million units.

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Starting next week, a number of Ubisoft's legitimate PC customers will be unable to play their games because of problems with the titles' digital rights management (DRM) antipiracy schemes.

A handful of Ubisoft games won't be playable while the transition takes place.

The publisher has announced that it is "transitioning the hosting of many of its online services from a third-party data center to a new facility" starting on February 7, and as a result, most of its games will lose online functionality. However, because some of Ubisoft's PC and Mac games feature DRM that require a constant online connection to the publisher's servers, those games will be completely unplayable when the publisher takes those servers down for the transition. Ubisoft's uPlay service will also be down during the transition.

Ubisoft apologized for the downtime, saying, "This move ultimately will help us improve the maintenance of our infrastructure and deliver better uptime and greatly improved services for our customers."

Not all of the publisher's games will be impacted. It is keeping servers running for newer releases like Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Driver: San Francisco, and Just Dance 3. Full lists of the games that won't be impacted and the ones that will be rendered completely unplayable follow below.

Games that will be unplayable during transition
Assassin's Creed--Mac
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2--PC
Might & Magic: Heroes VI--PC
Splinter Cell Conviction--Mac
The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom--PC
The Settlers--Mac

Games that will have online functionality throughout transition
Anno 2070
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Driver: San Francisco
Just Dance 3
The Settlers Online

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Japanese debut of Final Fantasy XIII-2 were big hits for Square Enix in 2011 and helped the publisher post a strong profit during its latest period.

For the nine-month period ended December 31, 2011, the publisher posted net income of ¥5.01billion ($65.78 million), up 175 percent from last year's haul of ¥1.82 billion ($23.8 million).

Adam Jensen was a valuable asset for Square Enix during the period.

Square Enix attributed the sharp increase in net income to sales of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Final Fantasy XIII-2, which were released in Japan during the period. Revenues from Square Enix's Web, smartphone, and social networking services were also called out as contributors to the bottom line.

Total net sales during the period came in at ¥95.74 billion ($1.26 billion), down 2.5 percent from the ¥98.18 ($1.28 billion) recorded a year prior. A significant chunk of that total stemmed from the company's Digital Entertainment business unit, which posted ¥53.7 billion ($704 million) for the period, a rise of 6.2 percent from the year prior.

Square Enix said its full-year forecasts of ¥65.61 billion ($861 million) in net income on ¥130 billion ($1.7 billion) in net sales remain unchanged for the year ending March 31, 2012.

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